


Missing Moments

by SeeEmRunning



Series: Sam at Hogwarts [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Supernatural
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:04:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2774036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeEmRunning/pseuds/SeeEmRunning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of scenes from the Sam at Hogwarts series that either didn't make the final edit or were written when I was asked to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Suicide Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What did Sam's suicide note say?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for this chapter: heavy suicide ideation, offscreen suicide attempt

Fuck it all, I’m done.

I can’t do this anymore. If all goes well, I won’t be around to face the music, so might as well get it out, right?

I hoped, so hard, that things would be better here. I hoped with everything I had that I would be better here.

But I’m still the freak. Story of my life, right? Wizard in a family of hunters, hunter in a school of wizards. There’s a certain irony in not belonging anywhere, I think. It’s poetic. I can’t go back to hunting full-time, and I can’t move forward to being a real wizard as long as my hunting is a problem for people. I’m just stuck, here, no way to go anywhere and no control over anything.

Even my body, for the last few weeks, hasn’t belonged to me. I shield and shield and shield, but things get through. I’ve grown tentacles, lost limbs, had my legs locked or turned to jelly, had my arms strangle me to the point of unconsciousness. And every time, I’ve known that it’s because someone in the hallways - people I’ve lived with for FOUR YEARS - think I’m too much of a freak to be allowed peace.

If this is the only way to find peace, I’ll take it. Gladly, happily. I’ve thought this through. I’ve been thinking seriously since the came out and I was banished from my own bed. I’ve been wondering in a not-serious way for years. Just part of growing up, right? Wanting to die?

It’s too much to hope that anyone but Lianne or Christina cares enough to read this far. Whoever finds me, let them know that they’ve been great. I would’ve been honored to be a real part of their family.

Goodbye.


	2. Sam's Detention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In third year, Sam got detention for being reckless in Herbology. This is what happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RIght now this is just the outline. When I write the fic itself I'll post.

Basically, what happened was the third-years were working with aconite. This is more or less harmless on contact, but on broken skin or ingested it can be fatal.

Sam, under the effects of the dementors, was sloppy with his handling, and splashed himself liberally with the juice of the plant. The people at his table were also splashed. Sprout, having warned the class repeatedly to be careful, grew angry that Sam was being so cavalier about safety and gave him a warning. When he brushed her off and continued handling it improperly, she gave him detention for failure to listen and reckless endangerment of himself and others.

Sam’s detention was inside, and he spent it transplanting Venomous Tentacula for the second-years’ use.


	3. The Visit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lianne and Christina visit Sam in the hospital wing during his fourth year.

They stared down at the bed silently. They’d taken chairs a few minutes before; they only had half an hour before they’d need to leave. Technically what Professor Dumbledore had done - bringing Muggle Hunters into a school of wizard children - was illegal.

Sam was pale and still between them, and had his chest not been rising and falling regularly, they could have mistaken him for a corpse. There was some kind of dressing over and around his neck, hiding the injury that had to be the reason he was in here.

"I wish we knew what happened," Christina said quietly.

"Yeah," Lianne said, staring at him. If this were a film, now would be the time Sam would open his eyes and they’d have a tearful reunion and an explanation.

But it wasn’t a film, and Sam didn’t open his eyes, and they didn’t have a tearful reunion after months of separation. They just had fifteen minutes of silence while Sam breathed shallowly.

Dumbledore approached. “I’m sorry, ladies, but we must go,” he said quietly, extending a rolling pin.

Lianne kissed Sam’s forehead, Christina his cheek. They put their hands on the rolling pin, and after a moment of disorientating spinning, they were back in their room.

"Professor?" Lianne asked before Dumbledore left. "If he - if he recovers in time, will we get him again?"

"Not this summer," Dumbledore said. "Perhaps next….The injury he sustained is severe enough that he will require six months of magical care after he regains consciousness."

"Thanks for letting us see him, then," Christina said hoarsely, fighting back tears.

"Of course," Dumbledore said, and then he was gone.


	4. AU: John Sends a Howler

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't take credit for this one. It was submitted anonymously over at my Tumblr. If you wrote it (or know who did), please let me know so I can credit you!

The first week of Sam's fourth year at Hogwarts had been more pleasant than the most of his others. There were no anxiety inducing spells or dementors waiting for him at the front gates this year. The only major excitements were the outlandish rumors rippling through the student body. Their main topic was what was going to happen during the Triwizard Tournament that Hogwarts had decided to host this year.

Sam had to admit when he had first heard its ridiculous, childish name he was convinced they were all yanking his chain. Later, when he heard about its long history of death and why the tradition had been put to an end, he had to take a few minutes to bask in how utterly stupid wizards could be at times.

The first few days had been awkward with his friends. They were still hurt from what they perceived as his lack of trust in them in the previous year. His friends were so much more than he deserved, though, and had started warming back up to him. Theo was to his left, casually resting his head on Sam’s shoulder as breakfast in the Great Hall started. Millie was seated on the other side of him, gripping his hand tightly under the table.

The flurry of owls descended on the Great Hall as it did every morning. Not exactly the most sanitary of procedures, Sam thought, but there were a lot of things wizards did that still utterly baffled him, even after four years in their world. Who was he to pass judgement? He had only gotten a few owls over his stay at Hogwarts, almost always from Lianne and Christiana, which is why he was so shocked when an unfamiliar owl started flying directly towards him, a letter tied to its foot.

It was bright red, something Sam recognized from faint memories of other students receiving them. When it fell in front of him on the table and the owl landed to perch on the bench, his friends eyed him curiously. They didn’t know much about his life at home, but they knew enough to know that there weren’t many people willing to send letters to him. “That’s a Howler,” Theo pointed out, and everybody at the table nodded. “You should open it and get it over with.”

Sam pinched the paper between his thumb and middle finger, as if it were something particularly nasty that needed to be disposed of immediately, trepidation mounting each second that passed. He opened it slowly, dreading what it was going to say. He ran over a mental checklist of any things he had done wrong recently (besides existing), and he couldn’t come up with one worthy of a Howler. When Sam heard the deep, booming voice that filled the hall, he suddenly wished to be anywhere but here.

It was all too familiar, the curse of his childhood, everything he had left behind when he was only eleven. His dad John spoke, “Hello, Samuel.” His voice was oily and greasy, gumming up his insides and slowing his heart rate. “It’s amazing how fast I can get you wizard freaks to talk- I guess you were just an exception as a kid. No matter what I did, you wouldn’t say how you were doing your freaky mind tricks.”

His face paled. Faintly, he could feel the eyes of every student and teacher in the hall on him, the silence heavy. “You thought we’d just let you go, boy? There’re only so many schools where they teach you that evil magic crap. Who knew that owls were such great trackers?” As if it were an afterthought, John added “If you hadn’t gotten your mother killed and she were still alive to see you now, she would hate you.”

Sam was out of his seat and out the door before anybody had even processed what had happened. He sprinted down the halls, nothing in his numbed mind but get out. He only stopped briefly to deposit the knives he had on him on the desk in Snape’s office, and he rocketed out the front door leading to the lawn. He didn’t stop running until colorful dots were dancing across his vision and his head felt like a tilt-a-whirl. He curled up behind a tree thinking, _What am I going to do?_


	5. Essays on Sam and Eating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Answers to some questions I got about Sam's eating and exercise habits.

Post-Year Five:  
Question:  
Sorry if this is a strange question, but is Sam suffering from an eating disorder/ weirdness about food (not necessarily a disorder) in Sam at Hogwarts, or is the excessive exercise, lack of eating, and concerns about his weight symptoms of his depression?

Answer:  
Not strange at all! 

At the moment, he’s more in the ‘depression/PTSD’ camp than the ‘eating disorder’ one, but he’s definitely got behaviors that can very easily progress to a full-blown ED.

In Year One, it was more about what he enjoyed and what he thought he should be doing than anything else - he liked salads, and he thought he should keep himself in shape.

As time progressed, not only did the threats to his life get larger (the basilisk, the presumed mass-murderer), the threats to his sanity also got larger as trauma piled on and he buckled under the strain of both acclimating to a strange way of life he’d been taught would kill him and everyone he loved and learning to deal with being psychic - a ‘freak’, in his own mind. He dealt with this by reinforcing his control over what he could - first his eating habits, then his exercise habits, and then, at the end of Year Four, when his life would end. His suicide attempt was as much about grabbing desperately for some sort of control as it was about being overworked, overwhelmed, and undersupported. And now, with his two major crushes dating each other and Umbridge coming in and putting more restrictions on him, he feels an even keener loss of control.

So yes, he has a ‘weirdness’ about food and exercise. It’s about control, and it’s about coping mechanisms, and it’s about destroying the parts of himself he dislikes. All of these are fairly common with EDs, from my (admittedly limited and almost entirely academic) understanding.

As of this moment, I am not writing Sam to have an eating disorder. I am, however, laying the groundwork for it while I figure out how, exactly, I want to approach it (how much emphasis to put on the physical effects, how much on the mental effects, how much the thought processes, his relationships, his job, etc.) and continue doing research so I’m not talking out of my ass when it comes time to bring that to the fore.

Question: How do you think Sam's problems with food and exercise developed and changed during year 5?

Answer:  
I think I really only addressed this once, in-fic.

_No matter how far behind he got, he always made sure to show up to at least two meals a day, though whether he ate was debatable. He also pushed himself to run further and further in the mornings, working off the stress of the impending examinations and his quick temper the best way he knew how._

In the beginning of the year, with the potion he was taking, it was certainly less pronounced. I mentioned he didn’t like Mrs. Weasley’s heavy cooking, but he “wouldn’t feel right” asking her to change. He spent most of the summer cooped up in a house he couldn’t run in, and he spent his days cleaning with a vengeance. I think between the heavy food and constant activity that wasn’t necessarily a workout, he was definitely on-edge some, but with the potion it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Then he got back to school, where he could eat salads and smaller portions without drawing attention to himself and start running again, which is something he was definitely relieved about. Still, with the potion, he wasn’t too bad, and he could fly beneath Umbridge’s radar right up until the six-month mark. It’s similar, I think, to how he would have felt and behaved back in his first year, when it was about what he liked - salads, fruits, and running.

When he was taken off the potion, there was a definite uptick in reckless/dangerous behavior. Along with that came his focus on food control and exercise. Snape’s long-ago edict of “two meals a day, you miss it one day we talk, you miss it two days you get detention” still stands, and so Sam makes sure to at least be in the Great Hall during two meals.

The major problem, at least while he was on the potion, is that nobody’s ever shown him a better way to work off negative emotion than by these disordered behaviors. Nobody’s suggested (for example) writing or talking to friends, and growing up as John Winchester’s son, these aren’t possibilities that will occur to him on his own. He really had about six months where he was best able to learn to replace restriction and excessive exercise with productive coping habits, but that didn’t happen.

Now, without the potion, he’s facing learning those coping mechanisms the way everyone else does, and it’s hard, especially since Sam doesn’t even recognize there’s a problem with the way he copes. Replacing bad habits with good ones is difficult even when it’s not tied in to mental illness.

When he started getting detention more often, OWLs grew closer, and he started recognizing that his friends were capable of cruelty, his stress levels skyrocketed, and so his eating declined and his exercising increased. With the expulsion and everything else at the end of the year, Sam was barely eating at all. It’s very much a stress response, at this point in time.

In short, they’re slowly getting more and more extreme without the potion there to balance out the underlying problems, and it’s becoming less about food and exercise themselves and more about the need to control his own life.

Post-Teaching Students:  
Question: Is Sam mostly recovered from his eating problems? It seems like he is doing much better, but he still seems to be relying on changes in his eating and exercise habits to cope, such as running double the length when he was stressed.

Answer:  
I wouldn’t really call it “recovered”, per se. Emily’s leaning on him pretty hard to eat more, but food/exercise are still his go-to coping mechanisms. It’s more that as-of-now-in-the-fic, he’s trying to keep his girlfriend happy, and it’s been two months since his arm got hit, so he’s relatively adapted to it. His life is pretty low-stress right now, so he doesn’t really need that coping mechanism right now, if that makes sense?


End file.
